Malcolm Muggeridge - Life Quotes

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This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.

Malcolm Muggeridge
It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits — like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding — inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is for ever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitability of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention.

Malcolm Muggeridge
The first thing I remember about the world — and I pray that it may be the last — is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which everyone has in some degree, and which is, at once, the glory and desolation of homo sapiens, provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.

Malcolm Muggeridge
To succeed pre-eminently in English public life it is necessary to conform either to the popular image of a bookie or of a clergyman; Churchill being a perfect example of the former, Halifax of the latter.

Malcolm Muggeridge
It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.

Malcolm Muggeridge
The only thing that really teaches one what life's about the joy of understanding, the joy of coming in contact with what life really signifies - is suffering, affliction.

Malcolm Muggeridge
The greatest artists, saints, philosophers, and, until quite recent times, scientists... have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid.... I'd rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr. Johnson, Blake, and Dostoevsky than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, and Bernard Shaw.

Malcolm Muggeridge